[Rant] Minor Rant III: For a Few Hollers More

fade

fade

Staff member
DarkAudit said:
Best Buy, this is why customers never come back.

I went to my local store, bad battery in hand, to see if I could get a replacement. First I had to wait nearly 10 minutes while the Geek on duty tried to explain over and over again what they were going to do to the Mac the elderly guy in front of me brought in. Finally another clerk came to assist me. Sort of. After describing my issue, and her confirming it was likely the battery, she told me they don't carry laptop batteries. ANY laptop batteries. She offered to order it, but I can do that just as easily from home. I explained I came there so I WOULDN'T have to order it, and I could have an easy return if it wasn't the issue. Oh well. I return home with nothing. Proceed straight to Amazon to place my order. It should be here Tuesday at the latest.

On a whim, I try to find my battery on Best Buy's site. Search for the same part number I used on Amazon. NOTHING. I use the model number HP gave the battery. NOTHING. I have to slog through 160-ish items and hope I find what I need. The only sorts are by brand, price, and customer rating. Nope. You lose.

I did eventually find something that *might* match. But it's too late now. Amazon found me a sure fit at half your price.
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Man, you've got a bad Best Buy. I've had good luck with this one. I've just about given up online for electronics, because Best Buy, Fry's, and Micro Center here tend to be within pennies of Amazon, because they know they'll lose business if they aren't.
 
Gared

Gared

Who has two thumbs and wants to kick his web host's ass?

<--- This guy!

After signing up for a new host (Wordpress.com is great, I suppose, if you want to run a very basic WP site, but they don't allow any Javascript to run on their servers, and I wanted that and access to the php on my site without having to pay an additional $100 a year (on top of the $99.99 I spent for my domain name), I patiently waited until the 60 day transfer prohibition to end, transferred my site, dumped all of the WP content for a custom site, pointed my nameservers, cleaned up my A, CNAME, and MX records, and was all ready to go. And it worked! For almost 3 hours. And now it doesn't, and no one can seem to tell me why. If I point my nameservers at Cloudflare, it doesn't work. If I point them at Cloudflare but pause the service, it doesn't work. If I point them at my host, it still doesn't work. I'm fairly certain that they're just providing me with an incorrect shared IP to point my A record at, since the one in my cPanel is different from the one that gets emailed to me when I send myself the email intended for my "web dev" to access the site. That should be a simple thing to clear up, right? HA!

The best part? My subdomain works fine - you can connect to it from the outside, it updates when I make changes, it looks like I wanted it to, the links work, everything - but all the main domain does is show me the name of the shared server that I'm connecting to and tell me what my (current, personal) IP is.
 
Denbrought

Denbrought

Gared said:
Who has two thumbs and wants to kick his web host's ass?

<--- This guy!

After signing up for a new host (Wordpress.com is great, I suppose, if you want to run a very basic WP site, but they don't allow any Javascript to run on their servers, and I wanted that and access to the php on my site without having to pay an additional $100 a year (on top of the $99.99 I spent for my domain name), I patiently waited until the 60 day transfer prohibition to end, transferred my site, dumped all of the WP content for a custom site, pointed my nameservers, cleaned up my A, CNAME, and MX records, and was all ready to go. And it worked! For almost 3 hours. And now it doesn't, and no one can seem to tell me why. If I point my nameservers at Cloudflare, it doesn't work. If I point them at Cloudflare but pause the service, it doesn't work. If I point them at my host, it still doesn't work. I'm fairly certain that they're just providing me with an incorrect shared IP to point my A record at, since the one in my cPanel is different from the one that gets emailed to me when I send myself the email intended for my "web dev" to access the site. That should be a simple thing to clear up, right? HA!

The best part? My subdomain works fine - you can connect to it from the outside, it updates when I make changes, it looks like I wanted it to, the links work, everything - but all the main domain does is show me the name of the shared server that I'm connecting to and tell me what my (current, personal) IP is.
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You might want to consider running a server, if you have the time. In my experience it greatly minimizes the margin of error for anyone but you, and it often cuts the re-sellers out of the way. Plus, you get to choose what you run, how you serve your site, how backups are done, etc. Setting up Wordpress is pretty foolproof.

For reference, my VC1S at Scaleway (2 x86 cores, 2GB memory, 50GB SSD, 200Mb/s bandwidth, 1 public IP) runs me $3.25/mo, and prices/specs scale pretty decently. There's also bare metal servers, if you don't like virtualized stuff, starting at pretty much the same price.
 
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GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
The only problem I've ever had with the hosting I use is that sometimes pictures I upload to it trigger their malware scanners. Mind you, the FILE is not infected, it's just... named in a way that sets off its red flags, I guess. See, when I was actively updating the image hoard, I'd name each file based on its content (like Car-crashes-into-tollbooth-fail.gif) so that it'd come up in my album's search function without me having to go through and put tags on every single picture the hard way.

Apparently, pictures titled things like "anime-schoolgirl-tentacle-demon-hentai.jpg" make it go "well, clearly THIS is a virus." And really, I have a hard time faulting it.

But apart from that, I've really had no complaints. It lets me use PHP and javascript and mysql and all that rot. I know there's hosting at the same price elsewhere that gives you unlimited bandwidth/storage, but I worry about running exactly what Gared has run into - being a low priority among thousands. The support team at GKG has really gone above and beyond for me, when I had problems.
 
Gared

Gared

GasBandit said:
The only problem I've ever had with the hosting I use is that sometimes pictures I upload to it trigger their malware scanners. Mind you, the FILE is not infected, it's just... named in a way that sets off its red flags, I guess. See, when I was actively updating the image hoard, I'd name each file based on its content (like Car-crashes-into-tollbooth-fail.gif) so that it'd come up in my album's search function without me having to go through and put tags on every single picture the hard way.

Apparently, pictures titled things like "anime-schoolgirl-tentacle-demon-hentai.jpg" make it go "well, clearly THIS is a virus." And really, I have a hard time faulting it.

But apart from that, I've really had no complaints. It lets me use PHP and javascript and mysql and all that rot. I know there's hosting at the same price elsewhere that gives you unlimited bandwidth/storage, but I worry about running exactly what Gared has run into - being a low priority among thousands. The support team at GKG has really gone above and beyond for me, when I had problems.
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Actually, this all turned out to be much ado about Chrome not letting the fuck go of its cache like I kept telling it to, and me apparently needing to run CCleaner to nuke the cache from orbit. The site is up, and apparently had been since the 24 hour propagation window closed, though there are still a few newly added links that aren't propagated yet. The main frustration point came when I followed their directions for submitting a tech support ticket and got an email 4 hours later telling me I'd reached customer service but that they'd forward it to TS.
 
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Tinwhistler

Tinwhistler

Gared said:
Actually, this all turned out to be much ado about Chrome not letting the fuck go of its cache like I kept telling it to, and me apparently needing to run CCleaner to nuke the cache from orbit. The site is up, and apparently had been since the 24 hour propagation window closed, though there are still a few newly added links that aren't propagated yet. The main frustration point came when I followed their directions for submitting a tech support ticket and got an email 4 hours later telling me I'd reached customer service but that they'd forward it to TS.
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looks good..
http://bruinandvixen.com/

Fixed the url for you..your link is bad :)
 
DarkAudit

DarkAudit

I am annoyed. Not angry. It's far, far too late for that now. Just annoyed and disappointed.

I've been using fountain pens for a few years now. Mostly for the uniqueness (go on. Say hipster. You know you want to.) compared to the standard ballpoints strewn about the house and at work. I was expected to fill out the fresh set of time cards at the change of every pay period. Coworkers got a kick out of the style of my flex pen manuscript. Only recently, after breaking them out again after a long lull, have I jumped back in whole hog. Buying new pens and inks and papers, and starting to make an effort to improve my handwriting after many long years of just... writing. The compliments I've gotten here and at work and on other forums are really encouraging, even when I don't see it as anything special compared to others. See r/handwritingporn some time. Yowza.

And that's when it hit me. I have been failed. The teachers I may have respected turned out to have kept me from realizing my full potential by simple benign neglect. By not correcting me when I did not take the writing lesson seriously. I wasn't trying for neatness or legibility. I was going for the sharpest pencil point I could so I could write smaller than my friend in the desk behind me. It was a competition on who could write smaller and use the least amount of space on the paper. When I wasn't doing that, it was a race to finish before anyone else. And if the text was borderline readable and the correct number of repetitions of the text on the blackboard, good enough.

The other crime against writing was systemic throughout the school. Since paddling was no longer acceptable anymore (they still did it sometimes), the new favorite punishment was... dictionary pages. If you got in trouble, you were assigned dictionary pages. Hand copying a quota of dictionary pages. And you had to do them at recess. You couldn't go out to play until your quota was done, no matter how long it took you. And the teacher got to choose the page, so you weren't going to be able to get away with using that last page that only used 25% of the paper, or one filled with illustrations.

So in my most formative years, they turned handwriting into a chore. Into drudgery. Into PUNISHMENT. And it's only now that I've realized what damage they've done.

It's a meme that girls have neater handwriting than boys. I have a theory about that now. Girls were less likely to get into dictionary page-level trouble when I was a kid. So they were far less likely to get the notion of handwriting was a punishment and something to be avoided.
 
Sparhawk

Sparhawk

Giving the opposite of this, I struggled with spelling while going through school. Got worse when cursive was forced upon me, I'm 48, so we're not talking just a couple of years back here, heck, we would even get swats with a paddle in gym for bad grades. I didn't get it, I didn't process how words were really put together until one class in high school CLICK HERE TO FIND THAT CLASS!! Just kidding, it was a typing class. Learning how to touch type solved my problem, because I wasn't trying to put all the letter together to make the word, I was just getting the single letters through my fingers to put it together. Cursive hurt me, it's not the way I think, the way I parse words.
 
fade

fade

Staff member
Cursive was one of the most useful things I learned. I was disappointed they dropped it from the curriculum for my kids. It's not exactly hard to learn, and if you need to write a lot, it's so much faster.
 
Gared

Gared

I absolutely hated writing by hand by the time I got to highschool. My thoughts tend to be somewhat... verbose... so my hand cramped up terribly, and my writing wasn't very neat or legible, unless I was writing scientific formulae or mathematical equations, where the precision was appreciated. I much preferred typing, and typed every report I could. Now that I have to type daily just to communicate, and electronics are everywhere, I find that I much prefer to write things down, it takes me back to school and the learning side of writing things down, and I remember them better if I write them down - even if I'm copying text from my monitor to a slip of paper, I tend to remember what I wrote far better than things I've just read or that I've typed.
 
AshburnerX

AshburnerX

fade said:
Cursive was one of the most useful things I learned. I was disappointed they dropped it from the curriculum for my kids. It's not exactly hard to learn, and if you need to write a lot, it's so much faster.
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At the same time, it's WAY more important for kids to learn typing at an early age these days. They used to not teach that until late middle school/early high school.
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
My handwriting has not improved since the third grade. I try to avoid writing things wherever I can, but some of the paperwork for my job requires me to write numbers on forms. At least once a week I get the "is this a 4 or a 9?" question from somebody.
 
fade

fade

Staff member
Since I am constantly writing math for my job, I learned long ago to cross my z's and to write 9's with a curl on the bottom like they appear in print.
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
Underling #1 just got attacked by a pit bull on her way walking back from lunch.

She's ok, the dog got her pant leg and started yanking.

Turns out it is being fostered and "somehow" got out. The fosterer thought "maybe the lawn people might have forgotten to close the gate." She swore up and down it never behaved this way before. Underling #1 is probably the least threatening adult human within 900 miles of here, she's a 5'4" 90 pound soft spoken latina. Most high school kids are bigger than her.

The attack happened literally right in front of a police officer.

Dog's probably going to be put down now, thanks to this incompetent foster lady.
 
Squidleybits

Squidleybits

I'm left handed and even though they didn't try to force me to write with my right hand, I was forever hounded about how I hold my pencil. It is pretty bad, but I don't remember ever being taught any differently.
 
PatrThom

PatrThom

DarkAudit said:
in my most formative years, they turned handwriting into a chore. Into drudgery. Into PUNISHMENT. And it's only now that I've realized what damage they've done.
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My mother did this for me. She felt my handwriting was sub-par (spoiler alert - it still is/can be). I've rarely given it any thought. But then a thing happened. I went and lived in Spain for a while. And while I was there, I took all my notes in Spanish. They look different. They're neat and orderly, there's even a visual flow to them. And now when I look at them, I think, "who wrote this?"

I would love to write like that again. Trouble is, I don't even know what was different, except for not writing in English.

--Patrick
 
Squidleybits

Squidleybits

The weird thing for me is that my writing, cursive that is, is terrible and just barely legible but my printing is very neat and easy to read. For reasons that never made sense to me, this was A Huge Deal to my mother and she would want me to redo my homework etc when I was younger. It got to the point that I hated to show her my stuff. From middle school on, I got excellent grades and my printing was far nicer and neater and easier to read, WTF was the point of redoing it in a messier version that my teachers would struggle to grade?

And clearly I have some issues don't I? It sounded better in my head as I was thinking it.
 
strawman

strawman

GasBandit said:
Turns out it is being fostered ... She swore up and down it never behaved this way before.
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You barely even know the dog when you're fostering, so that statement is stupid on face value alone.

I hope that whoever allowed this person to foster in the first place refuses to place any more dogs in her care.
 
Squidleybits

Squidleybits

People who either don't train their pets and/or don't adequately supervise them say that all the time.

I'm not being dog-ist. I've seen some surly cats too.

There is a dog that lives near us that likes to chase cars and bark at them and run into the side of them....
 
fade

fade

Staff member
Well to be the devil's advocate, it is sometimes true. Anecdotally, my own dog nipped at my niece once. I had never seen her do anything remotely close to that before. For my dog's part, my niece was trying to ride her like a horse, and I was trying to get my sister to stop her.
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
I can assure you Underling #1 was not trying to ride the pit bull like a horse.

However, when it first confronted her, she did the dumb thing and tried to assert dominance and commanded the dog to "stop."

That doesn't work when you're a slip of a girl.
 
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